Creative Climate: A Leadership Lever for Innovation

The working atmosphere within an organization has an important influence on its level of innovative productivity. Organizational leaders influence innovative productivity as well as the climate for creativity and innovation. This exploratory study included 140 respondents from 103 different organizations, 31 industries, and 10 countries, all of whom completed an online survey focused on examining the intervening nature of the climate for creativity and innovation. First, those who perceived more leadership support for innovation had significantly better creative climate scores. Second, those who perceived higher levels of innovative productivity also had better climate scores. Finally, organizational climate as an intervening variable between leadership behavior and innovation was confirmed through partial correlation and mediation analysis. The findings of this study support the pivotal role that creative climate plays between leadership behavior and innovative productivity.     

Doing Good by Splitting Hairs? Analytic Philosophy and Applied Ethics

This article explores the connections between analytic philosophy and applied ethics — both historical and substantive. Historically speaking, applied ethics is a child of analytic philosophy. It arose as the result of two factors in the 1960s: the re‐emergence of normative ethics on the one hand, and urgent social and political challenges on the other. But is there a significant substantive link between applied ethics and analytic philosophy? I argue that applied ethics inherited important ‘analytic’ ideals such as clarity and argumentative rigour. At the same time these ideals are not the exclusive preserve of analytic philosophy and applied ethics. Moreover, they are under threat from various trends within applied ethics. In this context I rebut the allegation that the anti‐revisionist reliance on pre‐theoretical moral judgements (aka ‘intuitions’) is less rational than their revisionist dismissal. The article ends with a plea for an analytic approach within applied ethics.     

"I would do anything for my child, even quit tobacco": Bonus effects from an intervention that targets adolescent tobacco use

This paper aims to assess program bonus effects on adult tobacco use from a long-term intervention that targeted adolescent tobacco use. The school-based community intervention started in Västerbotten County in Sweden in 1993 and adults were invited to support adolescents to stay tobacco-free. It was combined with repeated cross-sectional surveys in schools annually 1994–99 among grades 7–9 and after 1999 every second year. Participating schools were randomly selected before the first survey representing both rural and urban settings. Out of 4,055 students, 1,008 (24.8%) reported that their supporting adult had been a tobacco user who quit tobacco in order to be allowed to participate. Out of these, 13.2% used tobacco daily before joining. The remaining 2,997 students' adult partners were not tobacco users. Engaging tobacco using adults as partners in interventions targeting adolescent tobacco use seem to have a considerable tobacco-reducing bonus effect in the adults.     

Accommodation to What? Univocity of Being,Pure Nature,and the Anthropology of St Irenaeus

Abstract: This article, the author's inaugural lecture for the J.I. Packer chair at Regent College, Vancouver, takes as its starting‐point Karl Barth's penetrating question, ‘Accommodation to what?’ Suggesting that recent evangelical theologies have been too ready to accommodate to the immanentism inherent in postmodern culture, the article traces the roots of that immanentism to Scotus's teaching concerning the univocity of being, and suggests that in St Irenaeus's christologically shaped account of the nature and destiny of human life there is a theologically satisfying preservation of a proper account of transcendence.     

Relationships between perceptual defence reactions and subjective tendencies in the phenomenal representation of facial displays of affect

The present study examines if non-veridical reports of a stimulus-motif presented below the threshold for correct recognition are related to subjective tendencies in the ordinary perception of thermatically related stimuli. Sixty-four subjects were tested with the standard picture of Kragh's Defence Mechanism Test (DMT) which reflects a theme of aggression and threat. Stimulus-inadequate report of the picture-motif were related to the subject's phenomenal representation of video-recorded facial displays of anger, fear, sadness, and joy. The results demonstrate a correspondence between the individual's perceptual distortions, eliminations, or additions to the threatening subliminal stimulus and his or her phenomenal representation of the supraliminal affective stimuli.